Wake Up Wyoming: 9.18.17

TODAY’S TOP STORIES:

In a move that is largely seen as Maduro giving Washington the middle finger, Venezuela has made good on its promise to layoff the U.S. dollar, publishing its oil prices in yuan on Friday.

Last Friday, Maduro had announced the forthcoming change, but that threat came after 14 years of similar threats, made by former leader Hugo Chavez, who was sure the dollar would someday lose its place in the currency pecking order.

In its latest annual summary published at the end of June, the BIS found that total nominal global debt had risen to a new all time high of $217 trillion, or 327% of global GDP… give or take $14 trillion.

Following a not guilty verdict in the Jason Stockley murder trial, people took to the streets of St Louis to protest the unjust decision. During the protests on Friday night, a bizarre act of vandalism was caught on camera.

Chris Phillips recorded the incident, which occurred at approximately 11:32 pm and posted it to his Facebook. The video shows a police officer breaking out a window of Culpepper’s Restaurant located at 300 N Euclid Ave.

In what many have dubbed a flagrant intervention by Amazon itself to seemingly boost the rating of Hillary Clinton’s new book “What Happened“, the Telegraph first reported, and subsequently many others observed first hand, that Amazon has been monitoring and deleting 1-star reviews of Hillary Clinton’s new book “which was greeted with a torrent of criticism on the day it was released.”

Reviews of What Happened have been mixed, with some accusing Clinton of using it as an opportunity to blame others – such as former FBI head James Comey, Bernie Sanders, Vladimir Putin, social media and pretty much everything else – for her failure, rather than herself. Even The New York Times, which supported Clinton’s campaign, wrote that the book is “a score-settling jubilee”.

Joshua Reeves, an assistant professor at Oregon State University whose book Citizen Spies was released in March, sees a disturbing phenomenon emerging, fuelled by a culture of mutual surveillance fostered, most recently, by counter-terrorism programs such as “if it doesn’t add up, speak up”.

“In order for these programs to work, you have to tie snitching to moral and social responsibility, and you have to teach citizens that they are under threat, and that in order to handle that threat appropriately they have to be watchful and suspicious of their fellow citizens,” says Reeves.

Reeves doesn’t question the value of reporting serious felonies to police. But he does point out that “snitching” has resulted in some truly awful outcomes, such as the 2009 case of a boy set alight because he was thought to have reported a bike theft to police.

In the US, antipathy to tattling has even spawned its own movement. The “stop snitching” campaign features T-shirts with targets, bullet holes and the phrase “snitches get stitches”, something Baltimore police countered with their own pro-informant “Keep Talking” campaign.

Coastal development destroys natural barriers such as islands and wetlands, promotes erosion and flooding, and positions more buildings and people in the path of future destruction, according to researchers and policy advisers who study hurricanes.

Reading The New York Times these days is like getting a daily dose of the “Two Minutes Hate” as envisioned in George Orwell’s 1984, except applied to America’s new/old enemy Russia. Even routine international behavior, such as Russia using fictitious names for potential adversaries during a military drill, is transformed into something weird and evil.

This is the begging-for-the-overthrow-of-a-corrupt-status-quo economy we have thanks to the Federal Reserve giving the J.P. Morgans and Jamie Dimons of the world the means to skim and scam the bottom 95%.

Israeli banks are contributing to the proliferation of West Bank settlements by providing loans and mortgages for construction there, violating their human rights obligations, Human Rights Watch said in a report Wednesday.

Don’t look now, but North Korea has just won its latest diplomatic tussle with the United States. No matter how often Donald Trump promises to rain down “fire and fury” on the Democratic People’s Republic “the likes of which the world has never seen before,” it’s increasing clear that Kim Jong Un’s nuclear-deterrence policy is working and that there’s little the U.S. can do in response.